Hubert Herkomer (the von was added later) was a self-taught artist and son of a woodcarver. in 1879 he undertook this watercolour portrait of John Ruskin, the great writer on art, as one of a group of studies of famous men that he intended to bequeath to his children. He described the circumstances in which it was painted in a later newspaper article: 'I painted John Ruskin in 1879. It was a watercolour, a drawing of head and shoulders, life-size, painted at Denmark Hill, in the little garret bedroom which had formerly been his nursery. He seemed most anxious not to look at the painting until I had quite finished it; whilst sitting he was theorising about the methods of painting. I used in those days to paint abnormally large watercolours and always covered the paper first with a wash of some ochre or grey, then sketched the subject with charcoal. I would then commence with a hog-hair brush, working up the ground colour with some fresh tones and out of a kind of chaos produce a head.' Ruskin liked the result, describing it as 'the first that has ever given what good can be gleaned out of the clods of my face'.
The impact of Carlyle is vividly reflected in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, the short-lived journal that the Oxford set and their friends at the sister university produced in 1856. But it was John Ruskin (1819-1900; fig. 45), Carlyle's self-con- fessed disciple, who gave the argument the further twist that made it of real significance for Morris and Burne-Jones, asso- ciating poetry with painting and claiming that the artist too had a prophetic role to play, since the imagination could con- vey, through the medium of allegory and symbolism, pro- found insights into the nature of God. There is evidence to suggest that Burne-Jones had encountered Ruskin’s works at school, but he began reading them in earnest only in 1853, under the influence of Morris. Ruskin too now acquired "hero" status, becoming, as it were, the "Hero as Critic." "In aesthetics he is authority," Burne-Jones wrote; and again, "His style is more wonderful than ever; the most persuasive orato- ry we ever read." 14 Nothing was more "persuasive" than the doctrine of prophetic imagination as it was defined in The Stones of Venice (1851-53) and the second volume of Modern Painters (1846). For here was precisely the clue he was seeking as the clerical ideal faded — nothing less than the assurance that by indulging his love of drawing imaginative subjects he was doing something that was socially valuable and even retained a measure of priestly significance. It was long before he outgrew the habit of referring to his prospects as an artist in quasi-religious terms. "Up till now," he wrote in 1856, "I seem not to have done anybody any good, but when I work hard and paint visions and dreams and symbols for the under- standing of people, I shall hold my head up better." 15 Indeed, behind the facade of jokes and banter he would always approach his work with an intense seriousness which stemmed from Ruskin and Carlyle, even if it came to assume a form, an unshakable belief in the moral efficacy of beauty, that Carlyle at least would have repudiated with Calvinistic scorn. Carlyle's stern work ethic is also reflected in the relentless application — the "savage passion for work" for which he used to "thank the Lord in heaven" 16 — that made his career so astonishingly productive.